Zach Etienne (田哲何) is an Assistant Professor in the West Virginia University (WVU) Department of Mathematics. He earned his PhD in 2009 at the University of Illinois under the direction of Prof. Stuart L.
Shapiro. After earning his PhD but before joining the faculty at WVU, he was awarded two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships: the U.S.
National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Joint-Space Sciences Institute Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship--a joint position between NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland.
Prof. Etienne has been a senior member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since April 2015, and his work in LIGO has improved the performance of a key parameter estimation pipeline by more than two orders of magnitude. His work in numerical relativity has spanned more than a decade, with a primary focus on pioneering general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations of compact binary systems, including black hole, neutron star, and black hole--neutron star binaries. He is the principal author of several open-source numerical relativity codes, and his current work in this area focuses on GRMHD simulations and the development super-efficient, next-generation numerical relativity codes.
